Random notes from around the NFC East: DeAngelo in the slot, and another new entry to the bEast profile pic All-Star team

Unproductive blogging weekend for me. It was a rough week getting our house from neglected craphole to a respectable party venue for my daughter’s Christening. We had like 40 people there. Today will be cleanup. One person that was not at our Christening was David Diehl. He hit a few parked cars and blew a .18 yesterday. If he is suspended by the league, I’m not sure how much it’ll hurt the Giants. Diehl was one of the worst starters in the league last season, so I’m not sure how much worse his likely replacement, James Brewer, can be. The bigger problem is that it would deplete the Giants’ depth at OT.

Mike Jenkins is apparently going to report to mandatory camp this Tuesday. No surprise there. I’ll be reporting to Eagles and Giants camps this week.

The Cowboys signed Pat McQuistan. The Cowboys drafted him in 2006, he rode the bench for a few years, bounced around a little, and now he’s back. That doesn’t matter all that much. What does matter, however, is that the bEast gains another NFL profile picture All-Star.

Rich Tandler took a look at DeAngelo Hall getting work as the slot corner. That’s definitely something to keep an eye on in training camp and the preseason games. I don’t see it. Hall can’t even play the outside. I’m not sure what a switch to the slot is going to do for him.

Also from Rich, a crazy observation on the number of starts they got on offense from players they drafted. Just 48. 48. I’ll repeat again… 48. That’s out of a possible 176! Some of that was due to injury, suspensions, etc, but that’s just mind-blowing. And we’re not talking rookies here. We’re talking about the number of Redskins draftees, period.

Great look at Cowboys offensive line Bill Callahan’s rushing attack in New York with the Jets by Raf at Cowboys Nation. During the boredom of May and June, Raf has been doing film breakdowns and X’s and O’s posts like a madman. He’s worth a read just to get smarter about football even if you’re not a Cowboys fan.

I kind of suspect that all the references by Hall to playing the slot are more representative of a shift towards more zone and less man coverage.

Our new DB coach has been a cover-2 coach for his entire career. Hall can’t cover, but he can play the ball in the air. It seems like the perfect time to try to disguise Halls weaknesses by taking away his man coverage assignments, moving him into the middle of the field and getting him to move foward, from a zone.

Hall caught a lot of flack last year when he got roasted by Dez Bryant but, for me, that was all on Haslett’s zero blitz. How do you call a 9-man blitz when you know, absolutely know, that one of your corners is complete liability in man coverage. Hall, cannot man cover, everyone knows that, yet Haslett spent the entire year calling a defense predicated on having two man-cover corners, with a roster that at the most optimistic analysis would conclude had at most one of them (Josh Wilson).

I really don’t know how Haslett managed to retain his job. It was only in the very last few games of his second year that he started to move his OLBs around. One of the primary reasons that Shanahan wanted to try the 3-4 is that it afforded more creative options for who and how to blitz. Yet Haslett spent the best part of the last two years rushing the team’s most potent weapon, Brian Orakpo, almost exclusively from a wide right position, attacking the LT’s outside shoulder.

Trust me, Diehl getting suspended is probably a blessing if it happens. He sucks and is most definitely is not the future at RT anyway. This will force Brewer into the starting role, and we’ll be able to see what he can do. Coughlin is notorious for sticking with his veterans until the bitter end, so I don’t anticipate Brewer winning the job in camp unless something like this happens anyway.

Ah, but fortunately Martellus Bennett has been bulking up for just this sort of a situation. He knew weighing 291 pounds and showing no interest whatsoever in running routes was going to pay off eventually. OL depth problem solved!

I agree the Hall in slot experiment won’t work but I don’t know if I would say it won’t work because he can’t play the outside. Joselio Hanson was great in the slot but didn’t do so well on the outside